


Five Things Carter Wanted to Be When She Grew Up

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 100-1000 Words, 5 Things, 500-999 words, Backstory, Character Study, Community: sg1_five_things, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-13
Updated: 2006-10-13
Packaged: 2017-10-03 21:37:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian





	Five Things Carter Wanted to Be When She Grew Up

1\. An astronaut. When she was four years old, she sat on the floor in front of the television and watched, rapt, as human beings walked on the moon for the first time. From that moment her childhood was filled with visions of space and stars and planets and the space program -- books and model spacecraft and trips to the planetarium in any city they moved near that had one, star charts and an illuminated globe and an astrolabe and a rotating model of the solar system. The more she learned the more she wanted to know; her enthusiasm never waned. She'd lie on her bed in her darkened room with the box planetarium projecting constellations on the walls, and pretend she was floating in the stars. She'd watch footage of astronauts and know that someday it would be her out there, going EVA in the bulky suit, bounding across a low-gravity moonscape or tethered to the skin of a shuttle or space station to make repairs. The universe would curve in reflection across a faceplate with her face inside it, and she'd reach through vacuum and touch eternity.

 

2\. A motocross racer. There wasn't any money in it and her dad would disown her. But she loved dirt bikes and she loved going fast and she was good. She read all the racing magazines and tinkered with her own bike and entered races without telling her parents until she broke an arm and couldn't bring herself to lie about how it happened. She thought her dad had a gleam of pride in his eye even as he read her the riot act. That didn't keep him from putting a stop to it, but she kept reading her magazines and building her dream bike in her mind and imagining the races she'd win someday.

 

3\. A runway model. She was too active and too hard on her clothes to wear pretty things too often, and she'd rather be teased for being a tomboy or an egghead than for being a girly-girl; it was a lot easier to fight back when you weren't wearing a nice dress. But she loved fashion and frills and fabrics with a dreamy fascination, and on the runways of Paris and Milan in her mind she wasn't too skinny or too tall anymore -- she was beautiful, and glamorous, and she moved with grace and confidence through a sparkling, perfumed world. With the other base kids on whatever street they were living on that year, she played Army and War and cowboys-and-Indians, and her GI Joes were kitted out with all the best gear, but in the privacy of her room she pulled out her secret stash of Barbie dolls and dressed them in dreams.

 

4\. An engineer. Except she could never have chosen between mechanical and electrical, and she really was more interested in the underlying physics, and astrophysics was where her heart lay. But all through college she felt the pull of those other majors, and thought about the happy childhood hours playing with her Electronics 1-2-3 set and how much trouble she thought she'd be in when she took the television apart to fix it so that they wouldn't need to do the contortion dance with the rabbit ears anymore. She'd grin, remembering the moment when her mother came home to find her sitting on the living-room floor with the set's components laid out neatly around her -- the rebellious determination she'd felt, and the way her stomach had dropped when she saw she'd been caught. After a moment of silence, her mother had said, "Can you put it back together?" She'd nodded, and her mother had said, "If it works the same as before, I'll only ground you for a week. If it works better, two days -- and that's because you didn't ask permission. Next time you ask." "Yes, ma'am," Sam had said, and before long they were asking her to fix things instead of her asking them for permission to. She'd have liked to make a life's work of that. In her study carrel in the deeps of night, her eyes swimming with theoretical equations and her mind bursting with ideas, she still dreamed of that sometimes -- dreamed of a job that would challenge _all_ her skills and use _all_ her talents -- and wondered if it was out there somewhere.

 

5\. Her mother. A woman who could pack up an entire house in a day and a half, fix a leaky roof or a cranky boiler and then sing a toddler to sleep, look as beautiful with smears of axle grease or baking flour on her face as dressed for a gala banquet. A woman who loved her children for who they were instead of what she wanted them to be. A woman with a big laugh and a bigger heart; a woman of strength and grace and competence. A woman who loved her husband with all her soul despite his faults and absences. A woman who would live on long after her death, no matter how tragically early that death came, because she had touched the world around her and made it better during the time she had.


End file.
